Omniscience and deliberation

Conclusion To sum up, we have argued that if deliberation is incompatible with (fore)knowing what one is going to do at the time of the deliberation, then God cannot deliberate. However, this thesis cannot be used to show either that God cannot act intentionally or that human persons cannot deliberate. Further, we have suggested that though omniscience is incompatible with deliberation, it is not incompatible with either some speculation or knowing something on the grounds of inference.

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Omniscience And Pantheism

This article argues that theism entails a species of pantheism on the grounds that there is simply no discernible difference between the God's knowledge of the world and the world that God knows. The case against this thesis begins with the traditional theory of distinctions. But since God is necessarily omniscient there is not even the possibility that these might be considered apart and thus distinguished in that way. But neither is it possible to do this by means of Leibnitz's law, that is, by finding some feature possessed by the one but not the other. Three potential areas of difference are considered but rejected, first, that knowledge unlike the world is representational, and second, that knowledge unlike the world is phenomenal – there is something that it is like to have. Both of these features, though able to distinguish ordinary knowledge from its objects, cease to provide the difference we require when extended to the case of divine knowledge. A final area of potential difference lies in the transcendent nature of God over the world, especially with respect to time, finitude and possibility. But this, in the end, is found no more able to distinguish God's knowledge from its object than the previous two suggestions.     

Subjective Situations and Logical Omniscience

The beliefs of the agents in a multi-agent system have been formally modelled in the last decades using doxastic logics. The possible worlds model and its associated Kripke semantics provide an intuitive semantics for these logics, but they commit us to model agents that are logically omniscient. We propose a way of avoiding this problem, using a new kind of entities called subjective situations. We define a new doxastic logic based on these entities and we show how the belief operators have some desirable properties, while avoiding logical omniscience. A comparison with two well-known proposals (Levesque's logic of explicit and implicit beliefs and Thijsse's hybrid sieve systems) is also provided.     

道教的财神崇拜与拜金主义的本质差异

顾名思义,财神崇拜,自然是对财富的祈求。社会在不断地发展,人类的物质生活,本来就应该越来越富足,人们对它的追求与祈愿,当也无可厚非。但我们却发现,同样以物质利益的追求为指向,我国本土宗教道教的财神崇拜,与西方传入的拜金主义,其实却存在着本质上的巨大差异。     

Digit ratio and celebrity worship

The current study tested the hypothesis that digit ratios would be associated with celebrity worship, especially among adolescents. Our sample consisted of 45 male and 61 female participants aged 12-14 years (M = 13.20, SD = 0.71). We measured the digit ratios on the participants’ right hands and used the 23 items of the revised Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS) to explore the degree to which participants engaged in celebrity worship. The average digit ratio was 0.95 (SD = 0.04) among male participants and 0.97 (SD = 0.05) among female participants. The mean CAS scores were 50.06 (SD = 20.63) for male participants and 64.49 (SD = 18.04) for female participants. The digit ratios for the entire sample were positively correlated with CAS scores (r = 0.29, p < 0.005). However, the digit ratios were positively correlated with CAS scores among female (r = 0.51, p < 0.001) but not male (r = −0.13, p = .394) participants. Our research found evidence of a significant positive correlation between 2D:4D ratios and celebrity worship in females but not in males, which indicated that females with lower digit ratios were less likely to worship celebrities.     

Anti-Individualism, Conceptual Omniscience, and Skepticism

Given anti-individualism, a subjectmight have a priori (non-empirical)knowledge that she herself is thinking thatp, have complete and exhaustiveexplicational knowledge of all of the conceptscomposing the content that p, and yetstill need empirical information (e.g.regarding her embedding conditions and history)prior to being in a position to apply herexhaustive conceptual knowledge in aknowledgeable way to the thought that p. This result should be welcomed byanti-individualists: it squares with everythingthat compatibilist-minded anti-individualistshave said regarding e.g. the compatibility ofanti-individualism and basic self-knowledge;and more importantly it contains the crux of aresponse to McKinsey-style arguments againstanti-individualism.     

The Fundamental Problem of Logical Omniscience

Journal of Philosophical Logic - We propose a solution to the problem of logical omniscience in what we take to be its fundamental version: as concerning arbitrary agents and the knowledge attitude...